The 'biologically-inspired' chemical computer

Scientists from across Europe are working together to create a "biologically-inspired chemical computer".

The BBC reports: "The ‘wet computer’ incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power."

The three-year, and £1.6m project, will use stable "cells", which have coatings similar to the walls of human cells, and which form spontaneously. Research has shown that when the walls (or lipid layers) of two of these stable cells meet, a protein will form a passage between them. This is how chemical messages are then transferred.

Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner from the University of Southampton is working on the project and explained to the corporation that the aim is not to make better computers than the ones we all use every day.

"The type of wet information technology we are working towards will not find its near-term application in running business software," he told BBC News. "But it will open up application domains where current IT does not offer any solutions -- controlling molecular robots, fine-grained control of chemical assembly, and intelligent drugs that process the chemical signals of the human body and act according to the local biochemical state of the cell."

Frantisek Stepanek, a chemical computing researcher at the Institute of Chemical Technology Prague in the Czech Republic, added: "If one day we want to construct computers of similar power and complexity to the human brain, my bet would be on some form of chemical or molecular computing. I think this project stands a real chance of bringing chemical computing from the concept stage to a practical demonstration of a functional prototype."